Bridging the Gap Between MERIS and OLCI with VIIRS Ocean Colour Data and Polymer Atmospheric Correction
Steinmetz, François; Ramon, Didier; Deschamps, Pierre-Yves
Hygeos, FRANCE

The VIIRS instrument has been launched onboard Suomi NPP in October of 2011 and since then has been providing excellent ocean colour imagery. Its broad swath allows an unprecedented average revisit time of about a day, with a spatial resolution of 750m. Polymer is an atmospheric correction algorithm which has been developped initially to process MERIS data, in particular in presence of sun glint, and has been selected as the MERIS processor in the frame of ESA's Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative. We have applied the Polymer atmospheric correction algorithm to VIIRS data: the resulting product is of good quality and the spatial coverage has increased with respect to the standard processing. It is therefore a good candidate to bridge the gap between MERIS and OLCI, for operational services and production of climate data records. We will present some VIIRS/NPP L2 and L3 products obtained using Polymer and compare them with MERIS ones during their overlapping period.